On July 31, 1845, Charlotte returned home from a short trip to find Branwell in a terrible state: in a letter to Ellen Nussey she writes that he had received a note from his employer Mr. Robinson sternly dismissing him and intimating that he had discovered that Branwell was engaging in conduct that he characterized as “bad beyond expression” and charged him, on pain of exposure, to sever any connection with his family. Charlotte in her letter tries to decorously skirt the particulars—Branwell had embarked on an adulterous love affair with Mr.—actually Reverend—Robinson’s wife, and they had been caught. Now Charlotte and the rest of the family had to deal with the results: “he thought of nothing but stunning, or drowning his distress of mind.” Ultimately they had to send him away from the parsonage for a week. Branwell had been boasting for years about his ways with the ladies. Sexual energy is an important aspect of the master. Now, having been caught and repulsed, he turned at once to drink—“drowning”—and probably opium—“stunning.” He will not listen and he will not change. The fearful dismay Charlotte feels and writes about was exactly replicated in Jane Eyre. When Jane refuses Rochester’s anguished plea that they ignore religious and legal barriers and flee to the south of France, she knows she must get away from his anger and from his threats of physical coercion. But she fears what he will do to himself. She dreads being an “instrument of evil” to him, anticipating that he might fling himself into the same self-destructive debauchery Charlotte witnessed in the life of her brother.
By January 30, 1846, she writes of Branwell that he never even attempted to find a new job and that he had reached the point where no one will hire him. This is not the worst of it; if he had any money “he would use it only to his own injury.” While Henry Hastings depicts Branwell-as-Hastings worn and scarred by excess, he is still clear-headed, active, and struggling against his enemies. By 1846 Branwell had tragically become much more like the Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre only worse. Whereas Bertha’s slide into bestiality is hereditary and unavoidable, Branwell’s degeneration was self-chosen and self-willed and could only lead to an early death.
When Charlotte imagined Mr. Rochester, what she pictured was in part the still romantically energetic and mysterious Henry Hastings and not the once delightful brother of her youth whom she now evidently disdainfully considered hopeless. But what fuels much of Rochester’s power is the novel’s frequent suggestions that in his past and, indeed, his present life he faces similar temptations and through strength of will must master himself and his fate. Or, far more darkly, bend other people and even his “fate” to his willful desire. So, for example, one afternoon, early in their relationship, Jane Eyre finds herself baffled by Mr. Rochester’s inexplicable anger and bitterness as he confronts Thornfield’s façade. Raising his eye to its battlements, he casts over them a glare of “Pain, shame, ire—impatience, disgust, detestation.” The conflict is a struggle between his past and what he might become. Much later the reader and Jane come to understand that he is thinking about his wife locked up in the third floor of the family country estate. Then, “another feeling rose and triumphed: something hard and cynical; self-willed and resolute.” It will be his decision to preserve the secret hidden there and to pursue the ignorant and innocent governess now under his spell. This thought “steeled his passion and petrified his countenance.” As Rochester’s secrets come to light, this scene looks darker and darker, his cruel will more shameless and immoral. Here, and later, he remains in charge, knowing that what he is doing—and willfully choosing to do—is wrong. Having confronted her brother’s will to destroy himself—Branwell was all too eager to profess this intention during the final months of his life—Brontë in scenes such as this presents a Rochester willing himself to do what he knows is wrong, a commitment he persists in until the very day of his aborted marriage to Jane Eyre and, indeed, thereafter as he urges her to defy conventional morality and flee south with him. It’s only at this point that Jane’s will defies him as she deserts him, running away from him much as, in her feelings and in her conduct, Charlotte Brontë was to more sternly defy and reject her pathetic brother in the final, perhaps inexorable, months of his willed self-destruction.
In Chapter Two we have seen Charlotte dreaming about Zamorna during her frustrating years as a teacher at Roe Head, picturing him in the moonlight standing by his war horse listening to “distant wild and wailing music.” And from the same period we glanced in Chapter Four at one of her poems celebrating this heroic figure from the Angrian chronicles in idolatrous terms: “He’s not the temple but the god . . . for me he dwells divine.” More than any other creation of the shared juvenilia, Zamorna was for Charlotte the emotional center of the project—dangerously, immorally attractive, and consequently, at the same time, the cruel yet desperately loved husband of her favorite heroine Mary Percy, whose tragic feelings for him fascinated her. Charlotte and Branwell had been writing about him for more than a decade. So, it is not surprising that, as she began to invent Mr. Rochester, she would draw upon this third source for the shadowy rider emerging from the dusk, and as the ireful master of Thornfield who steels his will to take Jane no matter what the consequences. The challenging thing for Charlotte as she writes Jane Eyre is to keep her demonic hero exciting and masterful, and then to somehow tame him into being the better man Rochester dreams Jane can help him become.
In her “A Peep into a Picture Book,” which the eighteen-year-old Charlotte dates June 16, 1834, Wellesley, her favorite narrator, is turning the pages and happens upon a portrait of his older brother Zamorna. Though always prone to criticizing and often deriding Zamorna, a strategy Charlotte frequently uses to keep her rapt fascination with this dangerous hero under control, in these pages Wellesley cannot ignore the man’s magnetic physical attraction. “Keen, glorious being!” His good looks are, Wellesley thinks, as sharp and brilliant as the scimitar hanging at his side, an exotic weapon that he whirls with the same delicate hand which grasps the bridle of his horse. The horse and the hands anticipate Mr. Rochester on the night Jane first meets him. Perhaps, too, the eyes, which “bode no good . . . Satan gave them their glory.” Spiritual rebellion defines him: “impetuous sin, stormy pride, diving and soaring enthusiasm.” This is the youthful Charlotte’s hero. We can trace in this passage many of the influences that shaped her as a writer of fiction, and we can see emerging recurrent elements that will reappear twelve years later in Mr. Rochester.
Charlotte and Branwell—like many Romantics—were intoxicated by the romantic reinterpretation of Milton’s Satan as the real hero of Paradise Lost. Hurled from heaven for his refusal to serve God’s mastery, the rebellious Lucifer finds himself in the newly made inferno, where
. . . the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes
That witness’d huge affliction and dismay
Mixt with obdurate pride and steadfast hate . . .
his face
Deep scars of Thunder had intrencht, and care
Sat on his faded cheek, but under Browes
Of dauntless courage, and considerate Pride
Waiting revenge . . .
Crucial to both Milton’s Satan and Charlotte’s description of Zamorna—and Rochester—are these eyes, brilliant with defiance. Her young demon revels in the impetuous sin and stormy pride that first caused Lucifer to rebel against divine authority. Rochester gazing up at the battlements of Thornfield Hall, defying his fate, grinding his teeth, stamping on the hard ground, preparing to break God’s law and man’s, was to be but the next, most complete of Brontë’s adaptations of this figure.
To Milton’s rebellious and fallen angel Charlotte added another literary character famous in her day, which she also found dramatically appealing, the Byronic hero. Here is Byron’s Giaour of 1813 emerging from the darkness:
Who thundering comes on blackest steed,
With slackened bit and hoof of speed?
Beneath the clattering i
ron’s sound
The caverned Echoes wake around . . .
This figure of male power and aggression, the “thundering” of his steed anticipating the “tramp, tramp” of Mr. Rochester’s first appearance in Jane Eyre, has all of Satan’s mysterious attractiveness, defiant rebelliousness, and bitter recollection of the past:
Dark and unearthly is the scowl
That glares beneath his dusky cowl:
The flash of that dilating eye
Reveals too much of times gone by . . .
Oft with his glance the gazer rue,
For in it lurks that nameless spell,
Which speaks, itself unspeakable,
A spirit yet unquelled and high,
That claims and keeps ascendancy . . .
Ascendency is the issue in all these cases. Milton’s Satan refuses to accept his defeat even as he acknowledges God’s superior power. Byron’s Giaour will fail to save the beautiful Leila from Hassan, but he will kill his adversary nonetheless. Rochester has tried to lock up the secret of his past as he defies his fate pursuing the innocent young governess.
Crucial for Byron and for Brontë’s heroes, both Zamorna and Rochester, is the stallion, the commanding hands, the reins of mastery. In her poem of December 19, 1835, “We Wove a Web in Childhood,” Charlotte elaborated on these elements in depicting Zamorna in an aristocratic setting, which in various ways anticipates Mr. Rochester at Thornfield. One evening Zamorna arrives looking like a “spurred and fur-wrapped demi-god.” Soon the erotic emerges as Zamorna finds his chosen one by his side, and
That hand, that in its horseman’s glove
Looked fit for naught but bridle rein,
Caresses now its lady-love
With fingers white that show no stain
They got in hot and jarring strife
When hate or honour warred with life . . .
Brontë revels in this conflation of violence and the sensual. There’s more than a little suggestion of the pleasures here shared by the dominating man and the dominated woman. Brontë already anticipates Rochester’s whip.
In Charlotte’s long story Caroline Vernon (1839), the account of Zamorna’s satanic mastery darkens. The title character, in many ways similar, like Elizabeth Hastings, to her inventor Charlotte Brontë and hence later to Jane Eyre, is a young woman with a very ambiguous relationship with a male authority figure: her guardian. She grows under Zamorna’s care into a fine and accomplished girl, but one who is perhaps too fresh, naïve, and romantic. She longs “to give up heart, soul, sensations to one adored hero,” to lose independent existence in “the perfect adoption of her lover’s being.” Caroline’s ignorant and idealized notions of love echo Charlotte’s in at least one aspect. In a letter written to Ellen Nussey in March of 1839, only months before the draft of this novella, she tells her close friend that if she is ever to marry, it can only be to a man for whom her “intense attachment” would make her “willing to die” for him.
Caroline’s romantic ignorance soon emerges as a danger—it’s as if Brontë in thinking about her extravagant notions of absolute self-abandonment for love has become wary of the inherent dangers in this attitude and wishes to explore them in this fiction. Once a kind protector, Zamorna comes to desire Caroline, giving himself over to “propensities that were often stronger than his reason.” Brontë intentionally wishes to disturb her reader with the overt suggestion of incest—a theme she had found dangerously attractive in Byron’s poetry. Later, in writing Jane Eyre, she will constantly stress her heroine’s small body, her reclusive passivity, which, deceptively, make her seem a little Jane to Rochester who relishes lording it over her.
Caroline now yields to passion. Dressing as a man, she comes to Zamorna’s palace unannounced, driven by “her wild, frantic attachment.” The worldly wise narrator warns that as for Zamorna, “all things bright and fair live for him;” and so he feels free, as Rochester is later to do, to take and to use whomever he desires. Caroline “darkly saw, or rather felt” what was happening but is overwhelmed with emotional delirium. Zamorna’s magnetic ruthlessness dominates her. His deep voice, dark and burning eyes strike her “with a thrill of nameless dread.” This is no longer her guardian; “something terrible sat in his place.” Exactly like Rochester after the revelation of Bertha Mason, Zamorna urges Caroline to go away with him. He too has a “little retreat,” deceptively looking like “a plain old house outside.” There, “nobody will ever reach it to disturb you. It lies on the verge of the moors.” At this point Caroline’s conscience is too feeble to oppose her passion. Zamorna kisses her saying, “in that voice of fatal sweetness which has instilled venom into many a heart, ‘Will you go with me to-morrow, Caroline?’” And her answer is a simple “Yes.”
These cross comparisons clearly demonstrate that Charlotte Brontë had been for many years working out characters, situations, and ethical problems she was later to handle so deftly in Jane Eyre. Tempted, Caroline Vernon will succumb to Zamorna’s amoral seduction as the younger Charlotte Brontë seemed to do in the years when she reveled in escape to her fantasy world depicted in poems describing him as her “god.” This yearning vulnerability of a young woman eagerly “throwing her heart and soul into her dreams, longing only for an opportunity to do what she feels she could do” constitutes a kind of self-analysis for Charlotte Brontë at this crucial point in her life. Approaching twenty-four years of age, deeply unhappy in the roles of school teacher and governess, voicelessly yearning much as Jane Eyre was to be upon her arrival at Thornfield, feeling the desperation of time passing, uselessness, the sense that her genius as a writer had foundered and mattered to no one, Charlotte imagined the “wild, devoted enthusiasm” of yielding to the master, a much older, already married, highly sexed man, as a blissful release and fulfillment.
And then it almost seemed as if fate had just that destiny in store for her.
7
Cord of Communion
Of all the secrets in Charlotte Brontë’s life, her experiences during the years 1842–1845, including her two-year stay in Brussels, were the most closely held, the most carefully guarded. In various ways she had been able to deal with her feelings for her father, her brother, for the romantic extravaganzas of her fantasy projections. Now, unexpectedly, she found herself plunged into the torment of a love that would become the far more powerful inspiration for much of Jane Eyre’s relationship with Mr. Rochester. And the secret of that love, and of what happened because of it, she guarded with jealous hostility from everyone she knew. And yet, again the paradox: in Rochester, more than in any other aspect of Jane Eyre, Brontë hid the most important moments of her recent life in full view for all the world to see.
In the years following Charlotte’s death, Elizabeth Gaskell, her first biographer, intentionally suppressed what she had learned from a visit to Brussels, which included conversations with the principal people involved and glimpses of a correspondence that was not published until many years later. Winifred Gérin carefully traces Gaskell’s efforts in “whitewashing Charlotte” to create a portrait of her as a good and admirable woman, rather than someone passionately in love with a married man. Which is, for all of its oddities of development, the central ethical question in Jane Eyre.
Plans for the Brontë sisters to open a school in Haworth led to efforts to find a suitable place for Charlotte and Emily to learn French. Through a local clergyman, an acquaintance of their father’s, they learned of a pensionnat, a boarding school for girls, in Brussels and of a young English woman studying there who could vouch for its respectability. When the owners learned the Brontës were, as they described themselves, daughters of an English clergyman of moderate means anxious to learn French with a view of instructing others, they offered to accept them at a lower rate, essentially as scholarship students. Everyone involved was actuated by the finest motives.
For Charlotte and Emily, whose lives had been spent in rural parts of Yorkshire, nearly everything about this experience was i
ncredible. Elizabeth Gaskell writes a full two pages simply narrating the hundreds of years of history that lay behind the building housing the school, a place that “had its own ghostly train of splendid associations,” which included a Renaissance infanta, an aristocratic guild of crossbow men, the mansion built for their splendid feasts, and the residence of their master-archer. In this shadowy anticipation of Thornfield and its own mysterious history they found themselves, in February of 1842, among eighty to a hundred pupils whose education was administered by a cool, professional woman, Zoë Claire Heger. Gaskell beautifully characterizes the first weeks of the Brontë sisters in this utterly new place: they “clung together” and kept themselves at a distance apart from the happy, boisterous, well-befriended Belgian girls, who, in their turn, thought these new English pupils wild and scared-looking, with “strange, odd, insular ideas about dress.”
Their French teacher, from the start, was Mme. Heger’s husband: M. Constantin Georges Romain Heger. At the time Charlotte was twenty-five, M. Heger thirty-three, his wife thirty-eight. In an important letter of May 1842 to Ellen Nussey, recording her early days at the pensionnat, Charlotte noted how she enjoyed the new discipline she was experiencing in taking orders from her professor. Having been a schoolteacher and then a governess, she finds it odd and yet strangely pleasing to again obey. She goes on, describing Monsieur Heger, the professor of rhetoric, as a man with a powerful intellect and a choleric temper. Sometimes he borrows the lineaments of “an insane Tom-cat”—sometimes those of a “delirious Hyena.” After which, she must generously acknowledge that occasionally—but very seldom—he could be “mild & gentleman-like.” However, there are problems: she finds herself troubled because he is very angry at the present moment—she has written a translation that he chooses to stigmatize as less than correct. Childishly, Brontë explains this is the case because he happened to be in “a bad humour” when he read it. Then, she tells her friend Ellen, when “he is very ferocious with me I cry - - & that sets all things straight.” Here we get an early glimpse of this new version of the master. It’s easy to see in these remarks, in the dominating brusqueness of his manner, in his intellectual authority and command, and in the dark, dramatic looks of her new teacher, the outlines of Mr. Rochester appearing.
The Secret History of Jane Eyre Page 11